What am I listening to

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a couple of months but lacked the time to sit and do it.

There are 32 podcast feeds in my podcatcher at the moment. There are an additional 10 in a list of feeds I no longer track. The volume of stuff means two things, I'm constantly behind real time and I have no patience for things that bore me.

I listened to Doug Kaye's IT Conversations before the word podcasting was invented, downloading the MP3s "by hand" and going thru the laborious process of transferring them thru the horrible Sony software to get them on my minidisc player. But I did that work because I have a commute of between one and two hours a day and what passes for radio in these Clear Channel days ... sucks.

So. Thirty two podcasts. I don't intend to bore myself by listing them all and the list changes as my attention span wears out so a list posted today would be out of date by this time next week.

But what I find interesting is the evolution of the types of things I'm listening to. I'm not sure what it says about me or if I'm at all like anyone else.

IT Conversations remains a staple in my podcast diet. I seldom skip a 'cast from that source. Leaving them aside I find that I have slowly dropped most independent "one person show" type of podcasts. When I started podcatching that's almost all there was available. But now fully eighteen of my feeds originate as public radio programs.

So effectively I'm TiVo-ing radio here. I have been going along feeling like I was assembling a "personal radio station" from an eclectic mix of things from around the world. But like most things we want to believe of ourselves that's only partly true. I do have music feeds from both nearby and faraway places (only one of the music 'casts I get is a radio program). And I've got a lot of geek stuff in the vein of IT Conversations, none of which would ever have enough of an audience to be on radio of any kind. My biggest portion, though, is stuff from public radio that I like but that isn't available at a time I find convenient.

I'm going to have to think on this. And figure out which public radio stations I should send money to.